About this episode

Trieu discusses his journey of launching an ergonomic dental product while balancing a full-time dentistry career.

Trieu became a dentist because he liked working with his hands and helping people - he got into UCSF's dental school as the very last student accepted, number 81 in a class of 81. Then the job started breaking his body. Aching neck, aching back, and mentors around him retiring early from surgeries. So he tinkered with some prisms until he could sit up straight and see like he was looking through a microscope, filed a patent, and built Hero Loops - ergonomic loupes that do the job of a $20,000 wall-mounted unit. He launched it one month before the pandemic hit. He still practises dentistry full time while running the whole thing. In this episode, Trieu gets honest about the brutal timing of launching right before Covid, the years it took to crack marketing after nailing the product, and how he thinks about building - including a psychology framework he borrowed straight from dentistry. What you'll learn in this interview: The origin story: how his own neck and back pain, plus watching colleagues retire early from surgery, drove him to prototype an alternative to the bulky $20K microscopes on the market Why he left dentistry income on the table for product income - and the scaling…

People in this episode

Host: Nathan Chan

Guest: Trieu

Topics covered

• entrepreneurship
• product development
• dentistry
• marketing
• pandemic impact

Keywords

• dentistry
• ergonomic loupes
• product launch
• marketing strategy
• pandemic

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: UCSF

Products: Hero Loops

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